This head of an official, with his striped wig tucked behind his ears, comes from a larger statue that was likely once displayed in a tomb chapel. Such sculptures served as receptacles for the ka (soul). To animate statues, priests performed a ceremony called the Opening of the Mouth so that the individual represented could benefit from offerings left by the living and breathe, eat, hear, and see in the afterlife. Although this man’s name, which would have been written on the statue, is now lost, the sculpture’s large scale and the choice to carve it from costly granite suggest that he was a high-ranking official.
Date
Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.
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Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), p. 51 (ill.).
Emily Teeter, “Ancient Art at The Art Institute of Chicago.” The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (1994), pp. 20 (ill.), 21.
Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 28.
Simon Connor, Être et paraître: statues royales et privées de la fin du Moyen Empire et de la Deuxième Période intermédiaire (1850-1550 av. J.-C.) (London: Golden House, 2020), pp. 71, 164, 228, 290, pl. 53 fig. 2.10.2n.
Art Institute of Chicago, Ancient Art Galleries, Gallery 154, April 20, 1994 - February 6, 2012.
Art Institute of Chicago, When the Greeks Ruled: Egypt After Alexander the Great, October 31, 2013 - July 27, 2014.
Art Institute of Chicago, Life and Afterlife in Ancient Egypt, Feb. 11, 2022 - present.
Panayotis Kyticas, Cairo; sold to the Art Institute of Chicago through James Henry Breasted as agent, 1919.
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